Lesley Stahl Says Journalists Getting Fired Is Worse Than Child Trafficking, Nazi Torture Dungeons

Lesley Stahl has seen a lot of horrible things over the course of her career at 60 Minutes, but none of it can compare to the horror she experienced watching her fellow journalists lose their jobs for being obnoxious.

"Oh God, this was awful," Stahl told Puck when asked about the half dozen veteran producers and personalities who were fired along with Scott Pelley, the veteran newsreader and combat survivor dismissed for insubordination. "This was by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed."

The worst experience she’s ever even witnessed. By far. The Puck reporter observed that Stahl's voice "trailed off, as if she was still having trouble processing what had happened during the past week or so."

Stahl is 84—even older than Joe Biden. She lived through 9/11 and the Jimmy Carter administration. She witnessed the self-inflicted debasement of her former colleague Dan Rather after he reported on forged documents purporting to cast doubt on President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. That was pretty bad.

What else might the iconic journalist have experienced in her career that was almost, but not quite, as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry?

Well, Stahl's first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder. The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele's twisted human experiments at Auschwitz. In 2020, she was forced to endure interviews with Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project super PAC.

It's entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist, and many journalists have described Pelley's termination alone as one the greatest tragedies to befall mankind.

Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic—a once-respected journalistic institution, much like 60 Minutes—said it would "reverberate in American journalism history as a symbolic execution of the single most groundbreaking and successful news program in the annals of U.S. broadcast television." Pelley himself compared getting fired for insubordination to "your spouse being murdered."

It's also possible that Stahl has mild to moderate dementia. Perhaps she can't remember watching parents negotiate to sell their children for color TVs. Her more recent output, on the other hand, is composed almost entirely of what industry insiders might call "vacuous fluffery."

Over the last few years, Stahl has examined the benefits of "gender affirming care," documented former congresswoman Liz Cheney's abiding hatred for Donald Trump, and extolled the (alleged) comedy of former Daily Show host Trevor Noah. Despite her reluctance to "become part of the story," Stahl performed a 60 Minutes monologue about her personal battle with COVID-19—a potentially harrowing ordeal given her advanced age, but less so given her exorbitant net worth.

Stahl encountered more traumatic experiences in 2025 while interviewing Yarden Bibas, an Israeli taken hostage by Hamas whose wife and two sons were killed in captivity. It's not entirely clear if Stahl viewed the hostages as victims, given her egregious attempts to empathize with the Hamas terrorists.

When another former hostage, Keith Siegel, described how his captors were "beating" and "starving" him, Stahl wondered if the terrorists had deprived him of food because they were also starving. "No, I think they starved me, and they would often eat in front of me and not offer me food," Siegel explained.

Please keep Stahl and her fellow journalists in your thoughts and prayers as they navigate this dark chapter of world-historic tragedy under the weight of  sorrow so profound that future generations will scarcely comprehend its magnitude.

Bless their hearts, the poor things.

The post Lesley Stahl Says Journalists Getting Fired Is Worse Than Child Trafficking, Nazi Torture Dungeons appeared first on .